September 2010 - Working the stone
Working the Stone
My mind is held hostage to an image of an African woman. She is sitting outside of her home and while it is not the scene of dust and poverty to which we have become accustomed and murderously complacent, neither is she affluent. She and her family survive. The image by which I am hostage is a homogenization; a poor generalization. She is non-specific Africa and I apologize to her for not knowing her well as I might. As an individual I have not cared for her with the intimacy sufficient to have learned her tribe or even her name, but there we are. We know our roles, she and I.
Can you see her, kneeling there under some sort of palm? The ground is well-packed earth, well-swept. Her dark hair is tightly braided in intricate designs which reveal dark canyons down into her scalp. She is working at a wide, flat stone, bending forward and returning back in firm, rectilinear sweeps, again and again, pushing another smooth and ancient stone along a well-defined groove. She is grinding the daily flour for her family.
I suspect that the stones has been used by the family for many years. Generations perhaps. But this may be more romanticized poverty and tradition, and less of the realism that I might have otherwise wished for.
Is it corn or millet she grinds, or is it a grain essential to that portion of the continent - a lifeline and a staple to her people - that remains unknown to me? I will never know, for this industrious woman is an amalgam of thirty-seven years of occasional sightings in the pages of National Geographic and Special Reports on SBS and the ABC.
I have heard her spoken of on radio and I have seen her in film. I have read about her in books.
It was five am this morning when she first visited me. The first image that appeared in my mind was nothing but a stone working a flat rock groove of its own accord. But the woman herself soon appeared and her corporeal, angular limbs inhabited that intellectual place which had been devoted to sleep. I was cozy between warm sheets and nudged in next to my lovely and warm, sleeping wife, but the image was there and a line of thinking was developing. Soon I was warming up the laptop.
And there she remains still, leaning into it, grinding her grain, her grinding stone moving again and again and again in a process that has been going on for years and is repeated across continents and generations - hard, impenetrable stones finding their groove after uncounted passes across once-flat surfaces riven by single, comfortable grooves.
I am focusing now on the stone in the hands of this silent woman kneeling in her shady grove, grinding the grain in that groove while upon her forehead barely perceptible beads of sweat appear, powdered by a fine coating of dust.
The stone moves on its gradually worn path. I have been captured by this image for that stone is me. Likely it is you, too. That worn path is that to which I am headed once I hop on that plane back to America. Back to a comfort zone of routines I have gradually taken on as life has continued to envelop me.
Soon I will return to my comfortably grooved work habits. Up early before the girls, I will stumble around in the dark so as to not wake Laura, and pull a long-sleeve shirt out of the closet by the light of my cell phone. I will draw a v-necked white undershirt from the bottom draw - there's a special way I have them rolled and placed in there so I can put them on in the dark and get it right - and then I will pull on my socks and pants.
I will wonder for the umpteenth time whether skinny men or blokes with slender feet have as much of an issue with getting their socks on as I do.
I will grab all the stuff from the room that I'll need to take with me, bundle it against my chest or stuff my pockets like a dero in a porn shop, and go around to Laura's side of the bed and kiss her on the cheek. I will stand in the half-light of the girls' room until I have convinced myself that I've seen their doonas rising and dropping in that beautiful, regular motion of babies at sleep.
I'll head downstairs to make a cup of coffee, diddle around for a bit, and edge out the door with too much in my hands. Overloaded, I'll fumble with the doors of my house and my car and tumble into the left hand side of my American car in my American life and reverse out of the drive and head down the road on the right hand side, seatbelt alarm dinging as I go.
And as I roll down the road it’ll be fifty-fifty whether my coffee is still on the bookshelf by the door.
I miss that well worn path. More to the point, in some very elemental and very human way I need well worn paths like that one. Maybe not the work groove specifically that much, but grooves nonetheless. Moment by moment and hour by hour I need to think a little less than I’ve been compelled to on this eight week trip.
I need to drive on auto-pilot.
I need to see people I regularly see, whether they be neighbours, Milt riding past my door, my mates in the German band, or Eddie who owns a pub called the Stone Jug and whom I often see as I go for a run. I need to casually note whether he’s wearing long pants yet, because he’s a stubborn Pole who wears shorts until November.
It is the end of our family holiday and we have glutted ourselves on Australia. I am quite full for now. I have over-eaten, and while no one is going to come knocking for an apology, I think I’ll rest a while in shady anonymity and slowly work the smooth grooves until the mildly nervous sensation that I am about to burst passes and I can go on again.
Thank you.
Kookaburra